1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to a technology for performing a drawing process for print data created at a personal computer (PC) and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image output apparatus is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-248834, which enables an access to a memory at a high speed in units of word, so that a processing speed can be increased for performing a drawing process to a page memory when an arbitrary rectangular mask pattern is used.
Furthermore, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-164549 discloses an image processing apparatus that fills a bitmap pattern corresponding to a density in a specified drawing range in a tiled manner based on a graphic drawing command, so that a drawing processing time can be decreased and a processing speed can be increased upon receiving an input of the graphic drawing command for an image having a moderate tone variation, such as a photograph.
With the technology disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-248834, when performing the drawing operation using an input mask pattern, it is possible to reduce a memory access and increase the processing speed, because a shift operation can be removed by repeatedly referring to a single word or a plurality of words in units of word. However, because a mask pattern width is uniformly set to either one-word width or a several-word width, there is a problem that a processing time may be increased for a drawing depending on a state of a rectangular drawing or an image drawing, upon performing a rendering process of print data.
Furthermore, with the technology disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-164549, the drawing process is performed in which the bitmap pattern corresponding to a density is filled in the specified drawing range in a tiled manner based on the graphic drawing command for spreading a specified density in a graphic drawing range on a specified page memory. Accordingly, it is possible to decrease the drawing processing time upon receiving the graphic drawing command to the image having the moderate tone variation and to increase the processing speed. However, when a data drawing process includes an image rotation process, the above technologies are not suitable for increasing the processing speed of the data drawing process.